Silent Playgrounds

by Danuta Reah

  She waited for a minute, her hand on the drawer. It was still quiet out there. She pushed Ashley’s file back into its place. Lee. If she was right, Ashley and Lee were friends. He might be keeping some contact with Lee. He talked about meeting up at the flat, by the garage with Lee’s name on… Would that be near where Lee lived? Lee’s file. What was Lee’s surname? Think. Bradley! It was Bradley. She heard a door opening along the corridor. Hannah! She ran her fingers along the files – Bradley – and frantically flicked through the paper in Lee’s file. There it was; Personal details. She checked the address, pushed the drawer shut, turned the key and whipped it out of the lock as Hannah came through the door.

  The pull-out tray was still open. She moved across to stand in front of Richard’s desk. ‘Still looking,’ she said over her shoulder. Her voice sounded odd to her. She slipped the key back onto the tray, and let her body push it shut as she moved closer to the desk. ‘I’m beginning to think it isn’t here.’ She looked at Hannah. ‘It just occurred to me, Richard is at the university, did you say?’

  Hannah nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, he knows I need it, the book, so maybe he’s dropped it off in the department. Perhaps I’d better go and check there. Anyway, I’ve left this stuff for him.’ She patted the folder on the desk. She wondered what Richard would say when Hannah or Neil told him about the book she’d been looking for. She’d never lent a book to Richard. She hoped they wouldn’t realize what she’d been doing.

  Hannah cleared her throat and said, rather awkwardly, ‘Neil said to tell you to make sure you’d got all your stuff.’

  She saw Suzanne off the premises. As Suzanne was heading for her car, half triumphant at having succeeded, half ashamed at her subterfuge, she saw Richard’s Range Rover pull in to the car park. Shit! Or maybe it was a good thing. She waited, watching as he uncurled his large frame from the car. He saw her, and looked embarrassed, hesitant. ‘Oh. Hi, Sue.’

  ‘Hi. I just dropped some stuff off for you. It’s on your desk.’ She took a deep breath. Attack first. ‘I may as well tell you – I pretended I needed to look for a book I’d lent you. Hannah and Neil didn’t want to let me through the door, and I got pissed off. I wasn’t going to be treated like a criminal.’

  Richard looked harassed. ‘Well, strictly speaking, your authorization …’ He scuffed his foot along the ground. ‘Neil goes by the book too much,’ he said.

  ‘Has there been any news about Ashley?’ She looked at him closely. He shook his head. ‘Well.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’ll be off. I might see you in a few weeks. Goodbye.’ She turned away and walked to her car. She was pleased to see he looked uncomfortable. He’d feel a damn sight worse when he found the map of old Beighton she’d left on his desk.

  11

  Polly still looked about twelve years old. She looked like a twelve-year-old who had been blatantly, decisively caught, but had decided to brazen it out. She looked at McCarthy defiantly. She glared at Corvin and slumped down in her chair. McCarthy was not being gentle. One set of the unidentified prints on the zip-lock bags were Polly’s. A search of the flat she shared with Lynman had produced a matching bag with a much depleted store of pills. He leant back in his chair and looked at her. Polly glowered at him. ‘At the moment,’ he said, ‘you two are the only names I’ve got. Of anyone who’s still around to charge, that is.’

  He saw the blood rush into her face. That had got her mad. ‘You don’t care, do you? You don’t give a shit!’ She looked genuinely distressed. She probably was. Emma and Sophie had been her friends.

  ‘I don’t like drug pushers,’ he agreed, keeping his voice level.

  Her face twitched. She was under a lot of pressure. Two friends suddenly and violently dead, what must have looked like a harmless deal – everyone knew that Es were no more dangerous than dope – suddenly threatening her from both sides. She must have been terrified. ‘I’m not …’ she said, and looked at both men again.

  ‘A pusher?’ said McCarthy pleasantly. ‘That’s what it looks like to me.’

  ‘Who? I told you! It was Emma. And Sophie.’ She wouldn’t meet his eye.

  ‘It’s Sophie as well now, is it?’ McCarthy kept his face benign, but he was starting to get pissed off. She was wasting their time, and she was going to be in a hell of a lot of trouble. ‘I don’t believe you, Polly. My information says it was nothing to do with Sophie Dutton. I’ve only got your word for it that it was anything to do with Emma Allan. Do you know the penalty for dealing class A substances?’ Her face went whiter, and she looked round the room, blinking rapidly. She was starting to panic, McCarthy thought.

  ‘If I tell you …’ She looked at the two men and leant forward across the table confidingly. She still looked very young. One of the thin straps of her camisole top – a lacy scrap that contrasted oddly with her baggy trousers – slipped down her arm. McCarthy could read her mind. She was used to people being nice to her. She was used to older men being gentle, fatherly. For all her streetwise appearance, she didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain. He watched her slowly gathering her wits, trying to charm them and get the situation under control. Time to give her another spin.

  On cue, Corvin leant across the table towards her. Polly’s eyes filled with tears and she smiled tremulously as he came closer to her. For a few seconds he looked her straight in the eye. ‘You’re not getting it, are you?’ he said. Then he shouted, thrusting his face into hers. ‘Shit! Or get off the pot! Right?’ Thug mode.

  Polly jumped. Her eyes appealed to McCarthy who raised an inquiring eyebrow at her. Her lip quivered. She wasn’t used to this, not at all. He’d checked into Polly’s background. Father in banking, a manager of a local branch. Mother a primary school teacher. Polly was an only child. Someone from Polly’s background wouldn’t think twice about taking an E, smoking a bit of dope, but dealing? Getting involved on the fringes of dealing? He was pretty sure he knew the answer, and he intended getting it out of her.

  She was in tears now. A bit of TLC and she’d talk. McCarthy felt as though he’d spent the last hour pulling the wings off a butterfly. He pushed a box of tissues across the desk at her. She didn’t look at him as she pulled a handful out and wiped her face. He waited for a moment, then said, ‘Come on, Polly, be sensible. I want to get the people who did this to Sophie and Emma. I want the name of Emma’s supplier. I can’t ignore drugs on this patch …’ – I’m not making any deals – ‘I know you’re not the prime mover here, but you haven’t given me anything to work on. Tell me what you know, and let’s take it from there.’

  She looked at him with tear-filled eyes. She sniffed, blew her nose, sniffed again. ‘It was Paul’s idea,’ she said.

  Extract from interview with Polly Andrews:

  Paul had this idea, you see. We knew Emma was getting stuff, you know, Es, and Paul thought … No! He wouldn’t have touched the smack. I don’t know where Emma … I don’t know where she got any of it. Anyway, we knew where Emma kept the stuff. Yes, I think Sophie knew. I don’t think she was too happy, you know? Well, after Sophie left, and Dan and Gemma went to Germany, well, Paul thought before he left the house … you see, Emma didn’t really live there and she was mostly somewhere else by then. I don’t know where. She just came back to Carleton Road occasionally. Paul thought that he’d just get any stuff that was in the roof. Only he had this job and he thought Emma might come back, so I went. No. We weren’t going to sell it, it was just for us. It was because there was a lot and I only took half. Paul said I was daft, but …

  When you came, he thought it was the drugs, he thought maybe what happened to Em was something to do with the drugs. We knew about Em and the smack, so he thought … he’s very quick … he’d tell you about the drugs and about Em. If she was dead it wouldn’t …

  Ash Man? You mean Ash Lady … Yes … But it started as a joke, see. There was this programme on Channel 4 last year about people selling opium in London in the 1920s. You could then. No one stopped you. I think
… But women who sold opium, they called them Insi-Por. It means ‘Ash Lady’. You see? Em sold Es, she was seeing someone called Ash – Ash’s lady, Ash Lady. It kind of stuck. Ash Man? No, no one was the Ash Man.

  It was all Paul’s idea …

  Suzanne hadn’t seen Jane on her own since her trip to the police station on Wednesday. She couldn’t ask questions when Lucy was there. She wanted to know what had happened. There was something else she needed, something else that was beginning to fill her with that sense of urgency. She wanted to plan her weekend with Michael, arrange time with Jane and Lucy, take them out somewhere maybe, suggest a shared meal, arrange some time for the children to be together. She knew, and knew it with a guilty clutching in her stomach, that she was planning to have as little time on her own with Michael as possible, as little time to worry that the words she might use, the decisions she might make, the things she might do would work their black alchemy and leave her, sometime in the future, sometime not so many years ahead, watching him pulled away from her, calling her, pleading: Listen to me … listen to me … listen to me.

  I’m telling you …

  She was just planning to go across to Jane’s when she heard the back door open and Jane’s familiar voice calling, ‘Suzanne! Hello?’ She went through to the kitchen where Jane was putting the kettle on. ‘I brought you some apple and ginger,’ she said by way of greeting, waving some teabags at Suzanne.

  ‘How did you get on? Yesterday? Is there any news?’ Jane looked tired. There were lines under her eyes that hadn’t been there before. She, Suzanne, hadn’t really known Sophie – she was an acquaintance, but Sophie had been Jane’s friend, and Lucy’s friend as well. ‘How’s Lucy?’

  Jane pulled a face. ‘Oh, it’s just … I want to get her away from it all. Lucy’s not said much. I’m worried. She’s gone awfully quiet. Except about the monsters. Joel’s no help – he just keeps telling me to keep Lucy away from the police.’

  Suzanne reflected that Joel had never been any help with Lucy. Despite her misgivings about him, she found herself agreeing with him about the police. ‘Maybe he’s just worried about the effect that all the questioning will have on her. It might make her brood about it more, you know.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Jane agreed. ‘But actually, they didn’t ask to talk to Lucy again. I think they were a bit thrown by all the monsters last time. They asked me what I thought, if she’d said anything to me since, you know, but she hasn’t. They got me to look through some photographs, to see if I could recognize some of the people I’d seen Sophie with.’

  ‘Did you?’ Suzanne wondered whose photograph Jane had seen.

  ‘One or two, mostly people who used to call at the house.’ Jane poured water into the cups. A spicy smell filled the room.

  Suzanne thought that she wouldn’t have been able to recognize anyone who called at the student house, or anyone she may have seen Sophie with. But Jane, for all her vagueness, had an artist’s trained eye, and was a keen observer. ‘Was one of the photos …’ She was aware of Jane’s quick glance. ‘It’s someone I know from the Alpha Project,’ she explained.

  ‘Oh, the one you got into trouble over.’ Jane nodded, remembering.

  ‘Yes. Was he one of them? Tall, fair skin, dark hair?’

  Jane nodded. ‘Pale and romantic, sort of Death of Chatterton? Yes, they showed me that one, and yes, I’ve seen him. In the park, with Emma. Not at the house.’

  Suzanne’s heart sank. ‘You told them.’

  ‘Oh, yes. That cheered your friend Steve up. He took me apart about that, but you see someone in the park, well, you see someone in the park.’ She shrugged. In the middle of her anxiety, Suzanne was diverted by the thought of McCarthy trying his various tactics to pin Jane down to exact answers. She knew from her own experience it would be like wrestling with smoke.

  ‘Do you think he had something to do with it? Ashley? The boy in the photograph?’

  Jane shrugged. ‘Someone with a face like that could probably get away with anything,’ she said. ‘He reminded me of Joel.’ She sipped her tea. ‘This stuff always gives me a lift. Drink yours. It’ll do you good. Listen, what I came to tell you …’ She looked down for a minute, not meeting Suzanne’s eyes. ‘I heard from my publisher yesterday. They want a meeting now they’ve got the drawings. I’m seeing them tomorrow, but I’m going up to London today and staying till Sunday. Lucy needs a change of scene. Joel’s got some kind of deal in progress there, and he seems to want to spend more time with Lucy, so I thought we’d make a weekend of it.’ She held her cup in front of her face and looked at Suzanne over it. Suzanne realized that Jane knew exactly what this news meant to her, and that Jane felt anxious.

  ‘Oh.’ She heard her voice sounding flat. She tried to make it more cheerful. ‘Michael will be disappointed.’ She felt a heavy weight descend on her. The weekend that had loomed over her with weighty responsibility, anxieties that she couldn’t quite name, now faced her like a sheer cliff she didn’t know how she was going to climb.

  After Jane had gone, promising to drop in and say goodbye, Suzanne went through her preparations for the weekend methodically. There was no reason to panic. She would meet Michael from school, and take him to the park … No, not the park. She would take him swimming and they could go and have something to eat at the students’ union – he liked that. He could have pizza and salad, his favourite. Then they could go home, and she could let him play games on her computer. And before she knew it, it would be late, and he could go to bed, and that would be one evening sorted out. Don’t you even want to be with him? a voice in her head remonstrated. She looked at the photo of Michael on the table. It was just a picture of a small boy. She let her eyes drift to the photo of Adam on the wall. Responsible… She felt the panic and fought against it.

  She built her preparations as a wall. She made up the bed in Michael’s room with his racing-car quilt that had been his special Christmas request, got out his pyjamas and his favourite towel. She checked the fridge and made a note of things to buy: the ham, the strawberry yoghurt, the cheese triangles that had gone to waste from his aborted weekend just six days ago. Was it really so recent? She checked her watch. Two o’clock. She needed to do something to help her relax, to try and get rid of the cold lump that had settled in her stomach. A few days ago, she would have gone to her study, done some work, but that was part of the anxiety now.

  She remembered Ashley’s tape in her bag, slipped out of its box on the shelves in the data archive in the department. She could listen to it again, see if she could find any further clues to places she might look to try and find him. She let her mind take a few steps in that direction. There was a sense of action, of purpose. What did she know already? Ashley talked about the garage – OK, that wasn’t very specific, but she knew from listening to the talk in the coffee bar, and the talk in the staffroom, that Dean at least had been hanging round the flats at the bottom of Ecclesall Road. She got the impression that there was some kind of contact – drugs, she’d assumed – that took him there. Her illicit trawl through the papers on Richard’s desk had given her a recent address for Lee: the same flats.

  There was a garage, an all-night garage, down there, which was close to the point where the social scene from the town centre tangled with the pubs and restaurants of Ecclesall Road, especially on Friday and Saturday nights, when the pubs spilt out onto the pavements, and the whole of the main road became a promenading party around the pubs, the eating houses and, less openly, the blocks of flats: concrete and green grass leading through to the remains of the urban park – now more or less built up – and the old red light district, and then on to the university. The modern blocks gave way to tree-lined streets with dark and pot-holed roads, the elegant rows of terraces and the old stone mansions turned over to multiple occupancy or business use. Working girls still walked these streets, waited on the street corners where the maze of by-ways allowed cars to travel slowly past, the interiors dark against intruding eyes. Two minutes’
drive from here, Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, had finally been apprehended. This was where affluence and poverty met, where expensive wine bars crowded against multi-screen pubs, where taxis and police cars, prostitutes and dealers competed for trade, where students exercised their right to irresponsibility, the employed threw off the shackles of the week and enjoyed the profits of their work, and the market that throve in a range of commodities operated in a range of venues, some well populated and lively, some dark, empty and alone.

  The phone rang, breaking Suzanne’s chain of thought. She realized she had become distracted by the problem of Ashley to the point that her anxieties about the weekend had faded into the background. She picked up the phone. ‘Hello.’

  It was Dave. ‘Suze. I’m glad I caught you. Look …’ His voice sounded conciliatory.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I haven’t forgotten. I’ll collect Michael from school tomorrow.’

  ‘No, look, it’s …’ She wondered what he wanted. It wasn’t like Dave to beat about the bush. She waited. ‘This weekend. I’m sorry to mess you around, but can we change it?’ He waited into her silence, then said, apologetically, ‘It’s probably … Look, you probably can’t … I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’

  Dave wanted to change the weekend. Almost at the last minute, he wanted to change it. Dave, who blamed and attacked her when the panic got so bad she couldn’t cope with Michael, Dave who shouted about consistency, Dave who said things like ‘He’s not a bloody pet, Suze!’ ‘Change it how?’ She kept her voice neutral, trying not to let her confusion show.